Chapter 1792: Rowan V Demon The scent of the other Primordial’s scattered essences was still sharp in the void, a cocktail of ruptured power and stunned pride. But Rowan’s gaze, cold and absolute, fixed upon a single point of imploding darkness—the wound in reality where the Primordial Demon had been slammed downward. The Great Abyss awaited, and his perception swept through it, knowing he was inside the Primordial Demon yet understanding that the Origin of Demon was inside the body that he had just punched. With a glance, he understood the general situation of the Abyss. It was a thousand levels of absolute negation, a spiral of anti-creation designed to erode and consume all that was. It was the perfect prison for hope, for light, for meaning. This would be a grand tomb for the demon. Rowan did not dive or descend. He simply stepped off the edge of existence and allowed gravity—not the physical force, but the gravitational pull of his own focused vengeance—to draw him down. He fell through layers of despair, through landscapes of solidified terror and oceans of liquid silence. Each level of the Abyss was an entire dimension, and the passage of Primordial Demon had destroyed all of them. A few demons were lucky to survive, but they would not live for long if they did not flee to the other side of Reality. As Rowan descended, the Abyss reacted to his presence not as an intrusion but as a cancer. It constricted, its nullifying essence pressing against him, seeking to unwind the very fact of his being. He ignored it. His focus was a spear aimed at his target, who seemed to be waiting for him. As he set foot on the earth, this layer of the Abyss vanished, and Rowan felt an impossible weight over him; he did not need to look upward to know that Primordial Demon had transported them to the lowest depths of the Abyss. Rowan looked around, seeing that they were on a featureless plain of black glass that reflected nothing. This was the heart of the Abyss, the ultimate silence. The Demon was already waiting. He was not a monster of claws and rage. He was a theorem of violence given form. Every line of his body, from the sharp angle of a shoulder to the taut cord of a tendon in his neck, spoke of maximum efficiency, of lethal economy. His fame was not myth; it was a cosmic fact. Across all realities, in every dimension where conflict existed, his martial art was the absolute pinnacle. It was not something he did; it was what he was. Xylos was the absolute expression of dominance through physical form. And he stood, waiting, because he knew. He knew Rowan would come for him this way. "Rowan, no, Eos..." the Demon’s voice was the sound of bones grinding together in the dark. "You come to me with only your hands. An homage? Or an insult?" "A statement," Rowan said, his feet settling on the glassy floor. "I will break you at your best." There were no more words. The Demon moved. One moment, he was twenty paces away; the next, his fist was an inch from Rowan’s temple. The technique was flawless, a strike that existed outside of wind-up or telegraph, leveraging the very physics of the Abyss itself. Rowan’s head moved a micrometer. The fist grazed his skin, and the air it displaced shattered the black plain for a mile around, erupting into a storm of razor-edged obsidian shards. The fist, missing its target, transformed to a palm, edge hardened to a state beyond diamond, aimed for the center of Rowan’s sternum, not to bruise, but to separate the molecular bonds holding his body together. If it landed, it would tear Rowan in two. Primordial Demon had called this move the Sundering Palm, and in the past, he had once torn a Reality in two with this move. Rowan’s body reacted before his mind could articulate the threat. His chest was concave by a precise inch, allowing the Sundering Palm to pass through the space his body had occupied a fraction of a second prior. The vacuum left in the wake of the missed strike tore the black glass floor apart with a sound like a continent shearing in half. The Demon flowed without pause from the missed Sundering Palm without missing a step. His hands became a blur, each finger striking like a needle-tipped viper, aiming for nerve clusters, energy meridians, the soft tissue of the eyes. Each strike was perfect, untelegraphed, and fatal. They came from impossible angles, leveraging the strange geometries of the Abyss. And Rowan met him, not with technique, but with adaptation. He perceived the micro-expressions in the Demon’s energy signature, the subtle shifts in weight that preceded a universe-shattering blow. He did not block; he flowed. He leaned back as a blade-hand passed, the shockwave carving a canyon into the nothingness behind him. He twisted around a kick that could have extinguished a sun, grabbing the Demon’s ankle and using his momentum to hurl him upwards through three levels of the Abyss with a sound like tearing silk. As the body of Primordial Demon shot upwards, Rowan brought his hand forward and rotated it as he twisted the fabrics of Reality with that simple move. Primordial Demon was no longer going up; instead, he was falling down, as the bottom of the Abyss became the top. Squeezing his hands into a fist, Rowan plunged down after the Demon, and he attacked with a punch, but the Demon was ready for it as he dismissively slapped Rowan’s blow aside, causing this level of the Abyss to explode from that missed attack. They fell into a lower level, as Primordial Demon took advantage of the slight change in flow and began to hammer Rowan with his perfected demonic martial arts. Rowan’s eyes shone bright as he employed the power of all his consciousness to become a ghost in the machine of the Demon’s art. He weaved, his head tilting, his torso twisting in motions that were millimeters wide. A strike meant for his temple grazed his hair, and the displaced air cut a canyon into the horizon. He didn’t counter-attack; he analyzed. He was mapping the rhythm of the Demon’s perfection, feeling for the infinitesimal spaces between the notes of the symphony of violence. Seeing his barrage fail, the Demon shifted. His leg swept out in a Kick, a low arc meant to shatter Rowan’s knees. As Rowan leaped over it, the Demon was already rising, the kick transforming into an upward elbow, aimed for Rowan’s jaw. Rowan, still airborne, had no leverage. He created it. He stomped down on the Demon’s rising elbow with his own foot, using the contact as a platform to flip backward, but the Demon anticipated the move. His other hand shot out, fingers clawed in the Heart-Rending Grasp, aiming to physically rip the core of Rowan’s being from his chest. Rowan twisted in mid-air, the claws tearing through his side and scoring four deep grooves across his pectoral muscle. Black blood, thick as tar, welled up. It was the first wound. The Demon smiled, a thin, cruel line. He had drawn first blood. Rowan smiled back as he began to feel his blood heating up, and the desire for violence was rising in his heart. They landed twenty light-years apart, this entire level of the Abyss now a cratered battlefield. The Demon didn’t pause. He exhaled, and the sound was the grinding of tectonic plates. He assumed a new stance, one of deep, rooted power. He became immovable, each step causing the entire level of the Abyss to tremble. He threw a punch. It was slow, deliberate, but it carried the weight of a collapsing star. The air in front of his fist compressed into a visible shockwave, a wall of force that rushed at Rowan. Rowan couldn’t slip this. It was too vast. So he met it. He planted his feet and threw his own punch, not with brute force, but with the Force of creation channeled into destruction. His fist carried the explosive, newborn energy of a universe’s first instant. The two shockwaves collided. There was no sound, only a silent, expanding sphere of annihilation that vaporized the landscape around them for a thousand light-years. The level was now a sea of molten obsidian before it collapsed, and they fell into the next. Rowan was aware that billions of demons were dying as they shattered the Abyss from their battle, but he did not care; not killing them was his grace, and he had already given them a chance to live if they were able to run fast enough. Every level of the Abyss had a name and history, but none of the combatants here cared about it, their devastation tearing through everything. On the Level called Screaming Shadows, the Demon pinned Rowan against a wall of frozen anguish and unleashed a barrage of a thousand strikes in a single second. Rowan took them, his body absorbing the impacts, his own flesh bruising and reforming in the space between blows. He answered by headbutting the Demon, a simple, primal move that carried the weight of a billion years of rage. The shockwave vaporized the entire level. On the Plains of Forgotten Hope, they traded blows that cracked the foundation of the realm. The Demon’s fists were wreathed in entropy, each contact seeking to age Rowan’s cells to dust. Rowan responded by hitting with the force of a primordial dawn, blows that carried the explosive, newborn energy of a universe’s first instant. The plains were scoured clean, then unmade entirely. The Demon charged through the chaos, untouched. He created afterimages of himself that lashed out with feints before the real attack came from a blind spot. A fist of solid gravity aimed for Rowan’s torso. Rowan, sensing the true threat a picosecond before impact, dropped into a low sweep, his leg moving with the slow, inexorable drag of millennia. It connected with the Demon’s ankle, not with a crack, but with a resounding thud that spoke of structural damage. The Demon grunted, his perfect balance broken for the first time. Enraged, the Demon’s form flickered. He abandoned physicality for a moment, becoming a cloud of cutting shadows. A thousand intangible blades sliced at Rowan from within and without. Rowan responded not with evasion, but chose to use his defenses. Since he disregarded his armor before this fight, he hardened his skin by accelerating time over its surface, causing it to experience eons of erosion in a second, making it harder than neutron star matter. The shadow-blades scraped against him, throwing off sparks of dead light. "No longer facing me hand-to-hand?" Rowan growled before he smiled under the shadow of ten thousand blades, "Two can play that game." He erupted from the clouds of shadows, his hands now wreathed in Entropic Palms. He began to strike the flowing blades, shattering them into ashes. Rowan’s watchful eyes finally caught a glimpse of Primordial Demon’s skull as he was starting to transform from shadow to flesh. He struck with a fist that carried all the entropy of a dying Reality. This blow should have been cold, but it was raging hot. It connected with the Demon’s face, and the heat was so profound it didn’t burn; it vitrified flesh and bone into glass. The Demon roared, a sound that broke the silence of the Abyss for the first time. His glassified head shattered, and from the stump of his neck a new head, screaming, regrew. The fight was escalating beyond mere physicality, and Rowan’s mad grin was beginning to grow. Primordial Demon began to use the Abyss as a weapon as he tore an entire layer and crushed every soul inside, transforming them into screaming phantoms, he blasted it towards Rowan, not to attack, but to disorient, their wails a psychic weapon that scrambled thought. As Rowan was shaking off the mental assault, the Demon leaped into the air and came down with the force of a meteor, his heel aimed at Rowan’s crown. Rowan didn’t dodge. He looked up and stopped time. Primordial Demon froze in mid-air, trapped in a single, stretched moment of time. Rowan then delivered a devastating uppercut to the Demon’s exposed torso. The moment released, and the Demon was hurled upward and then downward as Rowan twisted Reality again, and he crashed into the level below. Rowan looked around, noticing that Primordial Demon had released so much blood in their short exchange to fill a million oceans. A cold laugh that was almost childish came from him as he pursued the demon.